There could be a wild, sci-fi reason that SoftBank is spending $32 billion to buy mobile chip designer ARM Holdings

On the one hand,
it makes perfect sense why the Japanese tech conglomerate
SoftBank would want to buy ARM Holdings, the chip designer that
pretty much owns the mobile market.

SoftBank
offered £17 a share in cash for ARM (about $32 billion). That
was 43% more than ARM's closing share price on Friday and 41%
more than ARM's all-time-high closing share price. This could be
the largest-ever tech acquisition of a European company.

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ARM helped propel the mobile device market forward by crafting
designs for low-power microchips. It has done so well that it
pretty much squeezed Intel right out of this huge, lucrative
market.

The next step is the so-called Internet of Things, when everyday
devices and appliances will get low-power chips and sensors to
connect them to the internet. Your whole life, from your car to
your toothbrush, will soon be controlled by an app. And IoT is
already booming in the industrial world, with applications such
as controlling how much to water crops and monitoring elevators.

Son is a firm believer in something known as the "singularity,"
Higginbotham points out.

That's the day when people and machines will supposedly "merge"
to become something of a different species. Today we already use
things like pacemakers and cochlear hearing implants. Tech
companies are working on contacts that can monitor sugar levels.
Biomed companies are working on a bionic pancreas as well
as on mind-controlled 3D printed replacement limbs and tiny
nanotechnology biologics that may cure cancer.

On top of that, our everyday life increasingly depends on
technology to help us make decisions, with predictive analysis
helping companies make sales predictions and self-driving
technology helping us drive more efficiently.

Most of us already can't leave home without our smartphones. In
the future our very lives will depend on our collection of apps.
Some kind of informational computer chip implanted directly into
our bodies may seem less crazy in the future than it sounds
today.

"I think we are about to see the biggest paradigm shift in human
history. The Singularity is coming. Artificial intelligence will
overtake human beings not just in terms of knowledge, but in
terms of intelligence. That will happen this century."

"I still have unfinished business regarding the
Singularity," Son said. "I want to continue for at least another
five years."

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Pepper holding the hand of a newborn baby next to his mother at AZ Damiaan hospital in Ostend, Belgium.

Along
with turning people into machines, SoftBank is also creating a
robot that is much like a person: a robot called Pepper, who
can read human emotions and is doing all sorts of
customer-service jobs in Japan.

Between now and the singularity, SoftBank has plenty of other
reasons to want to own ARM's array of chip tech. ARM chips are
powering today's smartphones and tablets and other devices, and
the company is also working on low-power chips for computer
servers. It hopes to
own 25% of that market by 2020, according to some reports.

That server tech is also a boon for SoftBank, a company that runs
many data centers via its Japanese telecom company and Sprint.
And it plans on more, as it builds out its artificial
intelligence services.